When we left off at the end of Part 8, we were just about to embark on the painting stage, after getting a solid coat of primer down (Mr. Finishing Surfacer 1500 Black). I decided to start with the wheel bays:
Now I appreciate that Mustang wheel bays weren’t really interior green, but out of expedience, this one will be. I’m also going to fit the inner clamshell doors in the closed position to help hide as much of them as possible, since they’re totally inaccurate anyway.
I also decided that I would try painting the national insignia first, using the Montex mask set I had purchased. The reasoning here is that this would make it easier to hide the white fringing that you often see with painted markings that are laid over a white base layer. This didn’t go well however, as I discovered I’d put the upper wing insignia on the wrong side:
Luckily I had made backup versions of the insignia masks using my Silhouette Portrait cutter. But even after correcting this rookie error, I was far from satisfied with the results, and repeated attempts gave me issues that ranged from distorted insignia to paint lifting, and even one that turned out to be well oversized! In the end, I reluctantly decided to resort to decals for the national insignia, but paint the codes and serials.
Skipping all the grievous updates that show my stupid mistakes, I finally arrived at a successful application of Mr. Hobby H-53 Neutral Grey on the undersides:
This was followed by Olive Drab from an ancient bottle of Model Master enamel paint I had in the stash (the only example of such a colour I had):
In each case I applied the paint with a mottling technique, designed to give a subtly variegated effect. I think I went a little too far with it, and the end result is a little too uniform, but it’s effective enough.
It was at this point that I took another long break from the build, and it found itself back on the Shelf of Doom. By the time I returned to it in early 2024, I was on a mission to just get it done, so things accelerated rapidly, and it was all over pretty quickly. But we’ll deal with that in the next update! It’ll be a longer one, but we’ll bring this thing home in the process.
Stay tuned!